Pages

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

If this report is accurate (it's from World Net Daily, after all, which is
not always a sober news source) the Iranians have just made it impossible for the Israelis to refrain from launching an attack on the Iranian nuclear and military facilities. By calling for the complete annihilation of Israel and all Israelis in a massive pre-emptive missile strike against Israel's cities they have pretty much forced Israel to launch their own massive strike against Iran before the Iranians can carry out their plan.

The call for a pre-emption and annihilation seems to have come from surrogates of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, and although it could just be bluster and bluff, how can Israeli leaders afford to take the chance that they're not serious?

If there's any chance that this threat accurately reflects the thinking
of Iran's leadership, Israel surely will not wait until Iran's missiles
are in the air. It would take less than ten minutes for Israel to be
laid waste. Let Reza Kahlili, a former CIA operative in the Iranian
Republican Guards, tell the story:

The Iranian government, through a website proxy, has laid out the
legal and religious justification for the destruction of Israel and the
slaughter of its people. The doctrine includes wiping out Israeli assets and Jewish people worldwide.

Calling Israel a danger to Islam, the conservative website Alef, with ties to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the opportunity must not be lost to remove “this corrupting material. It is a ‘jurisprudential justification” to kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel, and in that, the Islamic government of Iran must take the helm.”

The article, written by Alireza Forghani, a conservative analyst and a strategy specialist in Khamenei’s camp, now is being run on most state-owned conservative sites, including the Revolutionary Guards’ Fars News Agency, showing that the regime endorses this doctrine.

Because Israel is going to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran is justified in launching a pre-emptive, cataclysmic attack against the Jewish state, the doctrine argues.

On Friday, in a major speech at prayers, Khamenei announced that Iran will support any nation or group that attacks the “cancerous tumor” of Israel.

Iran’s Defense Ministry announced this weekend that it test-fired an advanced two-stage, solid-fuel ballistic missile and boasted about successfully putting a new satellite into orbit, reminding the West that its engineers have mastered the technology for intercontinental ballistic missiles even as the Islamic state pushes its nuclear weapons program.

The article then quotes the Quran (Albaghara 2:191-193): “And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution [of Muslims] is worse than slaughter [of non-believers]... and fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is for Allah.”

It is the duty for all Muslims to participate in this defensive jihad, Forghani says. A fatwa by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini made it clear that any political domination by infidels over Muslims authorizes Muslims to defend Islam by all means. Iran now has the ICBM means to deliver destruction on Israel and soon will have nuclear warheads for those missiles.

In order to attack Iran, the article says, Israel needs the approval and assistance of America, and under the current passive climate in the United States, the opportunity must not be lost to wipe out Israel before it attacks Iran.

Under this pre-emptive defensive doctrine, several Ground Zero points of Israel must be destroyed and its people annihilated. Forghani cites the last census by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics that shows Israel has a population of 7.5 million citizens of which a majority of 5.7 million are Jewish. Then it breaks down the districts with the highest concentration of Jewish people, indicating that three cities, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa, contain over 60 percent of the Jewish
population that Iran could target with its Shahab 3 ballistic missiles,
killing all its inhabitants.

The radicals ruling Iran today not only posses over 1,000 ballistic
missiles but are on the verge of ICBM delivery and have sufficient
enriched uranium for six nuclear bombs even as they continue to highly
enrich uranium despite four sets of U.N. sanctions.

The Iranian secret documentary “The Coming Is Upon Us” clearly
indicates that these radicals believe the destruction of Israel will
trigger the coming of the last Islamic Messiah and that even Jesus
Christ, who will convert to Islam, will act as Mahdi’s deputy, praying
to Allah as he stands behind the 12th Imam.

There's more at the link. The Iranians also threaten to destroy the
United States in the piece. It's talk like this that makes war a matter
of when rather than if. The Israelis must be thinking that they simply cannot afford to ignore it. An attack on Iran, the Israeli planners must
reason, may have disastrous consequences for the world but the consequences of not attacking would be far worse. One way or another the fanatics in Tehran seem determined to precipitate Armageddon.